2014 Staff Picks: Part 3

Throughout the month of January I'm sharing our staff picks in a multi-part series. You can read the previous installments here and here. In today's installment I'm sharing my picks for the previous year. All of my picks for books have been reviewed here on the blog, and I encourage you to click the link to read the review for each pick.

Favorite Books

An Inquiry Into Love and Death and Silence For The Dead, both by Simone St. James: thus far, I've read and reviewed all of St. James' novels after falling in love with her debut novel, The Haunting of Maddy Clare. These novels are must reads for anyone who loves a good period piece with more than a dash of terror and/or suspense of the supernatural persuasion thrown in.

The Secret Rooms: A True Story of a Haunted Castle, A Plotting Duchess & A Family Secret by Catherine Bailey: if it seems like these picks have theme so far, sorry, that's just the way my picks shook out this year. I think the title pretty much says it all--it's British drama, it's a mystery, there's a family secret, there's sleuthing involved, and there's DRAMA, oh, and a scheming duchess.

The Matchmaker by Elin Hilderbrand; Hilderbrand writes stories set on Nantucket Island, and I've become a fan of these family dramas. This particular one requires tissues at the end (really, get ready to cry your heart out at the end of this one).

The Winter People by Jennifer McMahon: This is a very tense, suspenseful thriller with a supernatural twist.

Those are my favorite books from the previous year (in no particular order).

Favorite Movies

I used to also review movies sometimes on this blog before I switched the sole focus to books and began reviewing every book I read. I still watch a lot of movies, and I wanted to share some favorites from the previous year. Usually I wait until the movie comes out on DVD and one of the library's acquires it before I borrow it and watch it, but sometimes there's a movie that I'll want to see in theaters because I can't wait for the DVD. I had to see The Dark Knight Rises, the last of Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy (and before the sacrilegious re-casting of Ben Affleck in the role; for real, BEN AFFLECK. WHY.), in theaters. I also had to see Avengers (the first one) in theaters (did not regret it). I also saw Man of Steel in theaters. But all of those were not from 2014. And in case you noticed a theme to these movies, well, you won't be disappointed in my pick.

Captain America: Winter Soldier is the only movie I saw in theaters this year. At first I was just going to wait for the DVD, but then the previews sucked me in and made me incredibly anxious about what was going down in the movies--so much so that I was obsessing about the movie to my cousin on facebook ["Steve Rogers is a fugitive and he needs to STAND DOWN. WHAT IS HAPPENING"]. This particular cousin was the one that was going with me to see the movie, and I'm sure she was glad when we finally saw it because then I could stop posting about it on her facebook page. It was a great movie, and we were not disappointed.

Literary website

I just wanted to share with you a website dedicated to books that I discovered a while ago. It's called Book Riot. And if you're a book lover, you have to check it. There are articles about upcoming books, reviews, discussions about books, literary links, AND there's a shop that features literary themed wares plus so much more.

Those are my picks for 2014. What are yours?

--written by Ms. Angie

How To Be A Heroine: Or What I've Learned From Reading Too Much by Samantha Ellis

I feel as if I could write a book subtitled "What I've Learned From Reading Too Much" except all my lessons would be culled from Greek mythology, the Babysitters' Club, the lives of British queens, crime mysteries, suspense thrillers and celebrity and entertainment gossip. I first ran across How To Be A Heroine by Samantha Ellis in an ad in BookPage. The title sounded intriguing and once I looked it up on Amazon, I was in for reading it. It reminds me of the literacy autobiography writing assignment that I had in one of my English composition classes in college--except this is the literacy autobiography on steroids. The premise of this book is that the author revisits the seminal texts that she read in her youth by examining the lessons and impressions of the novels that she had upon her first readings when she was younger. Ellis has then re-read the novels as an adult specifically for the writing of her own book to see if the novels hold up to her original i

Heat Lightning by John Sandford

I'd previously read John Sandford's first Virgil Flowers novel, Dark of the Moon , a few years back and found it to be a quick, well written read. Recently I discovered he has since written three more Flowers titles and decided to start with the second title and read through to the fourth and most recent one. Heat Lightning is the second Flowers installment. The darkness of the crimes committed that must be solved in the novel are leavened by the lighter presentation of Flowers and the story. It works well together--a dark crime doesn't always need dark prose to back it up. Virgil Flowers is Lucas Davenport's go to man in the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension when there's a sensitive, tough or otherwise puzzling case to solve. Flowers has a high clearance rate and can often turn around a case in about a week. This particular case is especially perplexing with quite a few red herrings thrown into the mix to throw everyone--Flowers and the reader in

The Whisperers by John Connolly

If there was one thing Jimmy didn't care for, it was competition, ... There were some exceptions to that rule: he was rumored to have a sweet deal with the Mexicans, but he wasn't about to try to reason with the Dominicans, or the Columbians, or the bikers, or even the Mohawks. If they wanted to avail themselves of his services, as they sometimes did, that was fine, but if Jimmy Jewel started questioning their right to move product he and Earle would end up tied to chairs in the [bar] with pieces of themselves scattered by their feet, assuming their feet weren't among the scattered pieces, while the bar burned down around their ears, assuming they still had ears. from page 86 The Whisperers is John Connolly's newest Charlie Parker installment in which some beloved characters reappear and in which previous characters from another Parker installment reappear to shed further light on the big baddie that may or may not be coming for Parker in the future. This newest inst

A Series Of (Un)Fortunate Reviews

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